Noah — Discovering Elokim

Dear friends, last time we spoke about the final verse of Parashat Bereshit: “And Noah found favor in the eyes of Hashem.” We will now follow, step by step, this Noah, a man such as he is described to us. He is at peace with Heaven, he is at peace with creatures; he is at peace with the great — he finds his place among them and finds a way to coexist with them. Noach la-tachtonim: pleasant to those below him as well — he adapts his speech. Noach ba-olam ha-zeh: he is quite at ease in this world, he lets nothing show; and noach ba-olam ha-ba, speaking of the World to Come. So he is an exceptional man, a man of openness, seemingly open to everyone, trying to live with those around him on every level. He wages no battle; he does not want to. It is a way of conducting one’s spiritual life. That is to say: I consider that the spiritual life concerns my own person and nothing else. And so I take part in every activity as if nothing were different; I carry my values with me, and they are for me alone.

So is this truly the spiritual man par excellence? We know that the Torah has presented us with three types of men: Adam, Noah and Avraham. What is the difference between these three types of men in their relationship with the Creator — or, to put it differently, in their relationship with the Absolute? There is a verse of three words that we generally recite at bedtime: Lishuatcha kiviti Hashem — “For Your salvation I hope, O Hashem,” for Your assistance, for Your help. But this little verse can be read differently: Kiviti Hashem lishuatcha — “I hope, O Hashem, for Your salvation.” There is a difference. And there is a third reading: Hashem, lishuatcha kiviti — “O Hashem, for Your help I hope.”

The first is Adam, the second is Noah, and the third is Avraham. What is the difference? Sometimes we set out on paths that are beyond us, and all we ask is to manage to keep hold of the support we have. We have neither the strength nor the courage to face the difficulties of this world, and out of a spirit of resignation, out of concern not to stumble on our way and not to lose what we have gained, we use G-d as a spare wheel: we ask Him for assistance, we are forever pleading with Him. Yes, Adam began that way. Le-ovdah u-le-shomrah — “to work it and to guard it”: he was to remain in the Garden of Eden to preserve what he had acquired of the spiritual world in which the Eternal had placed him. But he chose to listen to his nachash, the serpent — that spirit, that serpent’s tongue speaking through him — and to take mastery of this world while remaining in the Garden of Eden. He fails, and then he says: there is no other way; from now on one must always ask for G-d’s assistance. The second is Noah. Noah is a man who does not want to remain dependent on Divine assistance. He sets himself challenges, he partly succeeds, he manages to hold a relative balance between the demands of G-d and the demands of life here below. But it is a difficult division.

Although G-d makes a covenant with him, at a certain point he must withdraw into an ark to save himself from the waters of the Flood. For in the world, in the environment in which he lives, by seeking to keep his own values silent and to keep them to himself, while being caught up in everyday life with the rest of the world, he cannot resist the current that sweeps him along — unless he decides to withdraw and shut himself up within himself. That is Noah’s ark. Finally, the third is Avraham’s: Hashem, lishuatcha kiviti — “O Eternal, I implore Your deliverance”: I seek to deliver You from the grip of other people, from the grip of this world.

I truly seek to make You recognized, to have Your presence acknowledged within this world — and thus to affirm all this spirituality, this morality, which testifies to the purpose of this creation. But this is a step forward, in which man seeks neither to use G-d as a spare wheel, nor to withdraw from his generation and concern himself only with his own spiritual quest. On the contrary, he wants his whole generation to benefit from his experience and to share it with them. In principle, these are not three different paths; they are three paths of access, three steps, which the Patriarchs themselves will take up and illustrate in different ways. In his first steps, man does indeed submit to the omnipotence of G-d.

This world frightens him; the task demanded of him is beyond his means. And so he clings there to his daily prayer, to ask for Divine assistance. But as his spirituality matures, fear disappears; he gains in confidence and tries to regard G-d as a partner in a covenant. And so he feels — he lives — his spirituality as a partner in the building of this world. It is true that the first covenant is made with Noah, with the man who regards himself as G-d’s partner in this universe. Then comes the third dimension: he advances further still, once he has realized what this withdrawal into oneself amounts to in the face of the many currents that threaten the world on every side — the flood of ideas, the flood of philosophical currents.

And he decides not to remain passive, not to confine himself within the four cubits of halakhah, but to confront his generation — and no longer to appeal to justice and severity, but rather to kindness. These, then, are the three stages that shape the growth of a spiritual outlook, from the child’s early years to maturity. Adam, Noah and Avraham are lived out as they were lived by Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov. Yaakov is the man who is tam; he is above all the man of integrity, the one who has internalized all values within himself. Yitzchak is the man of gevurah. If Yaakov is designated as the one who lives this spiritual quest from within, this spiritual quest is verified in the middot, in a person’s virtues.

Yitzchak is the sadeh, the field — and the field is indeed exposed to every kind of weather, to ground that is sometimes rocky, but one must try to hold firm and not be swept away by the current; and Yitzchak shows a withdrawal in relation to his father. Avraham is the one who is har, the mountain. Indeed, the Torah tells us of no virtue in Avraham that predisposed him to his spiritual calling; it is through continual trials. His life is nothing but trial, yet he decided to face them independently of any Divine assistance. The man of prayer is Yaakov; the farmer, the man of the land, is Yitzchak; the man who is truly engaged in an open dialogue with G-d, for the well-being of humanity, and who meets every challenge, is Avraham. So when we study Parashat Noach, we must keep in mind this development, this spiritual journey which is our own. For let us not forget that the Flood in itself belongs to a story shared by the various flood narratives of other cultures and civilizations — just as the laws of Sumer reflect certain laws that already existed years before, and which, for critical minds, were supposedly taken up by the Mosaic law. But in reality, once we accept that what matters in all things is the spirit that animates them — not so much the narrative, not so much the object or the matter, but the teaching that emerges from it… If creation is ex nihilo, in reality it has its source in the law.

That is to say, there is no creation that was not first preceded by a spirit, and it is that spirit which gave birth to it. Consequently, when we speak of the Flood, we can indeed regard it as an avalanche of laws or ideologies over which men quarrel and which fosters corruption — a liberalism of thought that lives alongside violence and justifies it. Noah, who withdraws into the teva, into the ark, is truly one who seeks refuge in the ark. The word used is teva. With Avraham it is called milah, circumcision. But milah is also “word.” What is the difference between teva and milah? Teva is bayit, a house — it is truly a withdrawal into oneself — whereas milah is an opening outward.

It is the opening of a dialogue. With Noah there is no dialogue; with Avraham there is one. Yet because Noah nevertheless sought to preserve his life in the face of all those who contested his spiritual calling — he who chose to shut himself up in the teva — he did benefit from something. He received a revelation. What revelation? He received the seven Noahide laws. Let me recall them: first, of course, the three cardinal sins, namely forbidden unions, idolatry and murder; then eating a limb from a living animal; theft — the prohibition of theft; the establishment of a Sanhedrin, that is, a court of justice, a court that legislates; and as the final commandment, blasphemy — the prohibition of blasphemy. But this revelation cost the lives of an entire population, a population which at the time was of course concentrated within the region of the Middle East. For once it is said al pnei ha-adamah, “upon the face of the earth,” this means that there was another part of the globe untouched by the Flood. There was no need for that. The Land of Israel matters only as the embryo it constitutes in relation to the whole of the terrestrial globe, of the entire universe; and in this respect the Land of Israel is distinguished by its seven fruits — and these seven fruits are all symbolic.

It is a land that represents the seven middot, the seven qualities. Now, we have always said that what matters most in a spiritual quest is the way it finds expression in our movements, our thoughts, our speech. That is what the middot are. The middot give us the measure of each person’s spirituality. Not piety, not knowledge, but the middot. Indeed, when we approach the study of Noah — Eleh toldot Noach, Noach, “These are the generations of Noah: Noah” — we said that Noah begets only his own person. He could not communicate beyond himself. When one cannot open a dialogue with the Creator, one cannot share it with one’s generation either.

But this Noah had three qualities: ish, tzaddik, tamim. When we speak of an ish, it means a man of high moral stature, chashuv, a man of importance. The one who was called ish is Moshe: “Moshe, ish ha-Elokim,” the man of G-d. Who is called tzaddik, righteous? Yosef — Yosef ha-tzaddik. And who is called tamim? Yaakov. In other words, Noah has a portion both of Moshe and of Yosef. We know very well that Yosef is contested by his brothers, and Noah is contested by his generation. He is ish like Moshe because he is the recipient of a revelation. You know very well that even the revelation to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai was accompanied by death, because a spiritual demand taken to the extreme, when we cannot measure up to it, deprives us of life.

There we are told that when G-d revealed Himself at Mount Sinai, the people was not able to grasp this Divine demand, this Divine manifestation, and it lost its breath. A dew of life restored it to life — quite simply because this people had shown unity before the mountain and had managed, for the occasion, to silence everything that is a source of division and dispute. For we must not lose sight of the fact that in the spiritual world, too, there is no escaping this. We must not always seek to make the spiritual world into a single uniform block. Each person has his own way of living his spiritual life; and just as there are seventy ways of interpreting the Torah,

there are seventy ways of apprehending G-d’s presence, belief in G-d, in this world. Yet it is said that when we remain at that level, the level of differing expressions, we are at the edge, a few steps from idolatry, because we are serving G-d through modes of perception. These are what the Hebrew language calls sarim. Sarim are princes, but they are simply secondary perceptions. We know very well how each person lives his Judaism. But there is a level that lies beyond these seventy degrees of perception: that of the one who succeeds in unifying all these seventy branches into a single reality that transcends them all.

Now Noah perceived something of this, but he remained at the level of Elokim. Elokim is an attribute of justice; it is not an attribute of kindness. Indeed, in chapter 6 we have et ha-Elokim hithalech Noach — “Noah walked with Elokim”: Noah perceived G-d from the angle of justice. But immediately afterward, in the following chapter, we see that the attribute of Hashem appears. The attribute of Hashem appears when Hashem reveals the Noahide laws. Let me try to find it in the text: “Hashem smelled the pleasing aroma, and Hashem said in His heart: I will not again curse the ground because of man, for the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” The Eternal pledges no longer to bring a flood — no longer to bring the Flood means no longer to hold humanity to the demand of “Hashem is One and His Name is One.”

He accepts that use be made of these Names, as can of course be observed today in the various streams of Judaism — I do not wish to dwell on this. Man is the one who lives, who is distinguished by this embodiment of values. Noah’s descendants, too, will bear witness to this spiritual development. I would point out that from the Creation up to the Patriarchs we are indeed going to follow a kind of synthesis of spiritual life: Adam will have three children, Shet likewise will have three children, Noah three children. What, in sum, do these three children represent? They are the three stages of development of every being, which nevertheless unfold simultaneously: nefesh, ruach, neshamah. The nefesh is a being’s biological existence, each person’s impulse, impulses; the ruach is the spirit, conception, the ideological forms; and neshamah — as you can see, within the word neshamah there is shem, the name — is the identity of the essence that dwells in each one, in every creature. There will be some who say that there is no neshamah in others. Let us leave that Kabbalah aside; otherwise you would hardly accept that people of foreign civilizations, of foreign beliefs, could join the Jewish people. There is a particular coloring, but everyone can attain it. In any case, nothing is static; everything is in motion. At times there are those who give priority to the nefesh, to this instinctive, impulsive life; there are those who will cultivate within themselves art, beauty, the elegance of thought and of life in all its forms — which is indispensable even to spiritual life, to the demands of spiritual life. One need only consider the majesty that emanated from the service of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, in the Sanctuary, which was called hod, majesty. And finally this neshamah, this spiritual essence, to which we pay homage every morning: Elokai, neshamah she-natata bi tehorah hi — “My G-d, the soul You have given me,” that You breathed into me, “is pure.” But these three together — Shem, Ham and Yefet — when they are not separated, they all make up Noah; they are all Noah.

What makes them unhealthy is when they are taken individually, autonomously and independently. At that point Noah, of whom it is said et ha-Elokim hithalech Noach, “Noah walked with Elokim,” later becomes ish ha-adamah. He becomes ish ha-adamah, the man of the soil, the man who plants a vineyard, the man who uncovers himself in his tent and exposes himself to excess. Why? Because va-yisha’er ach Noach — “only Noah remained”: Noah alone. He was unable to grasp in a single movement “Shem, Ham and Yefet.” Shem and Yefet are two noble virtues, energized, so to speak, by Ham, by each person’s impulses. That is how it ought to be.

What allows us to say this is the verse va-yoled Noach shloshah vanim, et Shem, et Ham ve-et Yafet — “Noah begot three sons: Shem, Ham and Yefet.” Each time there is this word et. The text could simply have said “Shem, Ham and Yefet.” Why this et? Precisely because it wished to distinguish each child as a different page of life. But when they are separated, that is the source of every deviation. Va-tishachet ha-aretz lifnei ha-Elokim, va-timalei ha-aretz chamas: “The earth was corrupt before G-d.” It is corrupt — corrupted even by those spiritual people who scorn the side of Yefet, of aesthetics, or who are forever wary of Ham.

They are overtaken, at some turn of events, by Ham and Yefet. It will be the same for the devotees of yofi, of aesthetics pure and simple, of elegance, of beautiful services, beautiful prayers, beautiful choirs — but the fervor of prayer is not there. […] it is mere trompe-l’œil. […] So: va-timalei ha-aretz chamas, “and the earth was filled with violence.” The earth was filled with violence — that is, hamas. Now you know that the generation of the Flood is accused of every evil: […] shefichut damim, bloodshed; idolatry; debauchery. But no — what is denounced is hamas. Hamas is violence.

Hamas, violence — why? Because the authentic spiritual line has been robbed, either by depriving it of its beauty, or by depriving it of its impulse, or by depriving it of its true essence. Then people no longer recognize themselves in one another. There is no longer any possibility of recovery, since all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth. That is what is called basar, flesh. Basar is said even of Shem, of Ham and of Yefet, because they did not know how to coordinate the movement of these three currents within a single spiritual perception. That is why G-d decides to remake humanity. Why is man no longer called adam?

Man no longer bears this title, this attribute. He is a creature of flesh like all creatures: ki mal’ah ha-aretz chamas mipneihem, “for the earth is filled with violence because of them” — because each of them is busy fighting over G-d, stealing Him, taking Him captive in his own way. In their own way. There is no longer any possibility of redemption, and that is why G-d asks that Noah be the starting point of a new humanity. And we said that this humanity, which is to be the new starting point, is in a teva, in an ark. But what is the secret of this ark? It is yud-he-vav. We gave the dimensions of this ark last week: yud and he — yud times he makes fifty; yud times vav makes thirty; and yud multiplied by he multiplied by vav makes three hundred.

These are the dimensions of the teva — which is the word, the vessel — the yud-he-vav in which Noah will take refuge, in the teva. And we notice that this teva lasts forty days. Forty days — but the Flood lasted more than forty days! If we count, there were forty days of the Flood, beginning on the seventeenth of the month; then there were a hundred and fifty days during which the waters increased, and a hundred and fifty days of the waters receding; and in fact he did not come out until ba-asiri, be-echad la-chodesh, in the tenth month, on the first of the month. That makes almost seven, eight months. Yet we are told that at the end of forty days Noah opened the teva. But there were more than forty days, were there not?

But the time one spends in the teva, in the yud-he-vav, bears no relation to the time one lives outside. The time of the teva is these forty days, which are the equivalent of the forty days of the giving of the Torah itself at Mount Sinai. And that time may be multiplied by five, by ten — that is the time that passes outside, which belongs to the nature of things but not to the spiritual life. Sometimes a single day of spirituality, a single hour of spirituality a day, is enough to cover twenty-four hours, and a single day to cover an entire lifetime. That is why it is said: Orech yamim bi-yeminah, bi-smolah osher ve-chavod — “Length of days is in her right hand; in her left, riches and honor.”

There is length of life, bi-yeminah, for those who stand at her right hand, those who embrace her. Indeed, length of life is there, because the essence of that life covers many days in the existence of this world. I will stop here; if there are any questions, I will gladly take them.